Apple M3 Ultra - Hackdot

Re:Apple M3 Ultra by officeplant on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @11:05AM (#43268415)

Loved my M1 mini, loved my M2 air. I've moved on to 2024 HP Elitebook with an AMD R7 8840U, 1TB replaceable NVME, 32gb of socketed DDR5. 14in laptop with a serviceable enough 1920x1200 matte screen. $800 and a 3 hour drive to the nearest Microcenter. I gave Apple another try (refused apple from 2009-2020 because of the nvidia era issues) and I just can't stomach living off of piles of external drives anymore to make up for their lack luster storage space on the affordable units.

The HP Elitebook was on Ubuntu's list of compatible tested laptops and came in hundreds of dollars less than a Thinkpad. Most of the comparably priced on sale T14's I could find were all crap Intel spec'd ones.

Months in I don't regret it at all and Linux support has been fantastic even for a fairly newer Ryzen chip and not the latest kernel. (I stick to LTS releases of most Distros) Shoving in 4TB of NVME storage and 96GB of DDR5 should I feel the need to upgrade would still put me only around $1300 invested in this machine.

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Re:Apple M3 Ultra by dwedge on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @11:36AM (#43268903)

I'm not really moaning about the cost or lack of upgradability. I mean, I don't like it but at least you know what you're getting into. I just always assumed Linux as a backup was an option, and more and more OSX is annoying me (last 2 or 3 days it keeps dropping bluetooth for 30 seconds) and more and more I just find the interface distracting. Plus whether it works with external displays over USB C is a crapshoot.

I'll miss the battery life of the M1 chips, and I'm going to have to re-learn how to type (CTRL instead of ALT, fn rarely being on the left, I use fn+left instead of CTRL A in terminals) but otherwise, I think I'm done.

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Re:Apple M3 Ultra by brailsafe on Wednesday March 05, 2025 @03:30PM (#43271903)

Surely you're using that thing as a laptop in a minority of cases though, looks like it's basically just specs you bought. That's fine, but if that's all you want then it seems like rather than trying to give a mac a reasonable go of it as opposed to whatever else, you were trying to instead explore a fundamental difference in how you value technology products, which is quite a different battle.

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Re:Apple M3 Ultra by officeplant on Thursday March 06, 2025 @10:40AM (#43281447)

Not at all. Sure when I'm at home its docked, but so far in Linux battery life has been fantastic. Not Apple fantastic sure, but I can get a good 5 hours of heavy use, up to around 8 hours of web browsing and video streaming. I often use it on the road, throw back quake3 lan parties, coffee shop creative sessions.

I just want decent enough power and no thermal throttling if I do have to hammer it. I make music so the extra ram and space for sample libraries is a big benefit and why I had to keep external SSD's around with my Macs.

My Macbook Air needed a usb fan ziptied to the laptop stand to not throttle at times.

>it seems like rather than trying to give a mac a reasonable go of it as opposed to whatever else, you were trying to instead explore a fundamental difference in how you value technology products

I re-evaluate how I feel about technology pretty often and its caused some shifts for sure. My side hobby is ARM/RiscV low power computing and Apple's move to ARM tickled that hyper efficiency side of my brain, but ultimately failed to keep me interested because of all the downsides upgrade/repairability wise.

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